With development of network technologies, social applications are used to provide information services. A user not only can perform message interaction with a friend of the user one by one by using a social application, but also can perform, in a group, message interaction with another user in the group. Even though a user can automatically determine whether to join a group, the user may be uninterested in messages in some groups due to different attention degrees. In this case, a social application provides a manner of performing do-not-disturb setting on a group message. For example, the user may set a group in which the user is not interested to a muted group, so that the muted group does not remind the user in real time when receiving an updated message.
Even though the muted group does not perform reminding in real time, the message still needs to be updated. In a related technology, generally, when the user logs in, a message is pulled from the server, so as to update the message to a social application client. Alternatively, when the user clicks to remove a group message reminding identifier, a message is pulled from a server, so as to update the message to a social application client.
The two message update methods in the related technology both update all messages, but a large amount of traffic of the user is consumed during each update. However, because the updated messages are messages from some groups to which the user pays no attention, information value of the consumed traffic is low.